LaaC: Part Seventy - The Breach

Part Seventy.  The Breach

Asking Carrie proved futile.

Not only did she not really know, she wouldn’t tell him anything that had happened before GLaDOS had sent her to Black Mesa.  “It’s not my story to tell, Dad,” she told him, shrugging in Alyx’s general direction.  Alyx was pretending not to be listening, though she clearly was.  “And anyway… is now really a good time?  We’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

Wheatley had left at that point, because in his opinion, they didn’t.

He got it.  War was a big thing.  Saving everyone on the planet was also a big thing.  But that would all end.  The war was only going to be seventy-two hours long, that’s what GLaDOS had said.  Then everyone would be safe, and it would all be over.  And then what would be left?  They would!  GLaDOS and Wheatley and Carrie, and all the things they needed to sort out.  That was what would be left.

Wheatley didn’t really consider himself a planner, so to speak.  His plans were usually awful, and while he could plan them out for quite a while in advance, they usually got mucked up right ‘round the beginning.  But because of that, he didn’t understand why he was the only one thinking about this!  Why was he the only one thinking about what they would have to do after it was all over?  Even GLaDOS wasn’t doing it.  She had a lot of things to do right now, that was true. 

Maybe she did have a plan, though, and he just didn’t know about it yet.  Best thing to do was ask, and so he decided to do just that.

She didn’t look terribly busy, though she did seem to be writing some code very quickly on one of the monitors.  Since she could do that in her sleep if she wanted, he asked, “Gladys, d’you know what um, what’s going to happen after we uh, after the seventy-two hours are up?”

“I do,” she answered, giving him a solitary glance.  “I’m not disclosing it right now, though.”

“Why?” he said in more of a pouty sort of voice than he meant, frowning in indignation.  “You c’n tell me, can’t you?”

“I could.”  She sounded amused.  “But it’s not important at this point.”

“It is!” he insisted, moving forward.  Not as close to her as he usually got, but not remaining in the doorway either.  “You’ve got to uh, to think about, about uh, about what’s gonna happen next, right?  Can’t just um, suspend all thoughts about the future, eh?”

He shrank a little when she gave him the most incredulous look on the planet.  “What happened to you?” she asked curiously, looking at him in a sideways sort of way. 

“Nothing?”

“You’re being too responsible.  It makes me suspicious.”

“Of… of what.”  She wasn’t really suspicious of him, right?

She shrugged and looked back at the monitor, code beginning to stream downwards once more.  “That you’re planning something.”

“I’m not!”

“I don’t mean something bad.  Just… in general.”

“Well…”  He didn’t know if he should bring it up right now.  “I dunno.  Just… well, I… I need to know something.”

She turned away from the monitor entirely, giving him her full attention.  That he had not expected.  Things must have been going very well on the battlefront.  “What?”

“What happened when… when I was gone, luv?”

He was a little scared to see her shut down on him immediately.  It was of an extreme he’d never seen before, not even when he’d asked about Caroline.  She moved back to her original position, pulling back and drawing her chassis inward, closing and dimming her optic.  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But I need to know!  I have to, you, you don’t – “  God, how could he nicely say ‘I feel like you got worse again since I left?’  He couldn’t.  How could he fix things if he didn’t know what had happened?

“You heard me.  And I’m not going to argue about it.”

“But – “

“It’s not important.”

And that was when he got it.

What was happening right then, it wasn’t important to him.  He didn’t care about the war, he didn’t care about saving all the humans, he didn’t care about any of it.  So he wasn’t able to focus on the fighting like everyone else could.  All he could think about were the people he cared about.  And now, even though he knew what the mixup was, he didn’t think he could make himself care.

“It is to me.” 

She was silent for a long moment, and then she said, “What’s important to you doesn’t matter right now.”

That hurt.

“I’m not saying you don’t matter,” she continued, but she wasn’t totally paying attention to him so it wasn’t very reassuring.  “But what we have to do right now has no correlation with what you want.”

So he had to put himself aside.  Again.

“Will what I want ever matter?” he accidentally whispered, sagging dejectedly.  He heard the sharp turning of her core.

“I’m going to fix everything,” she said vehemently, and when he looked up and saw her determination, he believed her.

“Alright.  Since we’ve a ways to go before we get there, I don’t s’pose there’s um… there’s something I can do for you, here,” he said as bravely as he could.  She was going to say there wasn’t, and he was going to feel even worse, but if finishing this stupid war off was what was important, well, he’d try to contribute.

“There is.”  She nodded her core towards the monitor with the milling dots.  Before he could protest that he didn’t think he could keep track of those, she told him, “Just tell me if any green dots show up.  Green ones, because… well, think about the Botanical Housing Depository.  Plants belong outside.  So do the green dots.”

He blinked at her in delight.  She’d made an association so he would remember!  How kind of her.  “Green stays outside, got it!”

“Way outside,” GLaDOS told him seriously.  “Very far away.  They’re an invasive species.  I need to know about them right away.”

“What are they, anyways?” he asked, watching the screen carefully for any green dots.

“What are what.”  Her voice had a distinct air of absence, like she’d immediately left him to do his thing.

“The green dots.”

“The Striders and the Hunters still haven’t shown up.  That is… unsettling.  I don’t understand what he’s waiting for.” 

He glanced at the blurry orange letters on her monitor and, yet again, could make nothing of it.  “Maybe he hasn’t got any?”

GLaDOS shook her core.  “I wouldn’t attack me without them, so I doubt he would.”

“So…,” Wheatley said, thinking hard, “per’aps he has a… he thought of something new?”

“I hope not,” GLaDOS answered grimly.  “That would be a disaster.”

That was when Wheatley noticed that one of the blue dots was moving in, past the orange line.  “Um… luv, I think… you don’t care what the blue dots’re doing, right?”

“Not unless they’re deserting, in which case I need to track them so I can kill them personally later.”

He didn’t know if she was serious or not, but continued to watch as the blue dot disappeared from the screen.  He supposed that meant the dot was so far inside the facility GLaDOS figured she didn’t need to watch it anymore.  He was terribly surprised, however, when the person the blue dot had been denoting burst into GLaDOS’s chamber, panting and disheveled.  “Ma’am,” he gasped, folding himself over so that his palms were splayed across his bent knees.  Wheatley wasn’t sure why he was doing that.  Perhaps he was falling ill?  In any case, GLaDOS didn’t really care about that so why was he coming in to tell her? 

“Ma’am?” the human repeated, still in his odd position but looking up at GLaDOS.  Wheatley himself was confused with her silence, until he remembered that she had keywords for when she was busy and that ‘ma’am’ was unlikely to be one of them, seeing as no one ever called her that.

“Gladys,” he said quietly, and felt a little embarrassed both because she turned to face him immediately and because of the sort of hurt look the human gave him.  It wasn’t his fault GLaDOS – well, no, it actually was.  But he’d worked for quite a while to get that sort of response from her, so he’d bloody well earned it. 

“What,” GLaDOS asked flatly, and though he was probably imagining it he liked the thought that she was a little disappointed that he wasn’t actually the one who wanted her attention.  He did, obviously, but he didn’t have a good enough reason to be getting it, not right now.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but… we can’t keep doing this,” the human told her, standing up straight now.  He pulled at the bottom of his shirt.  Half of it was still tucked into his pants, but the rest of it was bunched over his waistband.  There was a long tear down his left sleeve.  Wheatley wondered how that had happened.  He suddenly felt… wrong, in some way.  He was helping fight this war, he was, in his own way, but… the humans were out there, and they were taking the brunt of it, and… it almost felt wrong to say he was part of it at all.  It was such an… an impersonal sort of thing.

God, he thought with sudden realisation, this was how GLaDOS lived!  A part of everything, but never really involved in it, always far enough away that only the big picture mattered and anything less than that was inconsequential.  And so now that she was arguing with the human, telling him he had to keep going, he understood both sides and had to decide how to defuse it all.  GLaDOS stayed a step back from everything.  Understanding how the people she was directing felt wasn’t important to her, and she was unlikely to recognise that’s what she needed to think about right now.  But Wheatley could.  He could help here, he knew he could.  And in more of a way than just looking for specks on a screen.  He knew how to engage with humans.  He knew how to be friendly with them.  He could solve this human’s problem!

Now, what was the problem…

“Ma’am, we’d love to, and we’re trying to,” the human was saying, leaning forward a little with his palms facing the ceiling.  “But this… nothing’s happening, what we’re doing… it doesn’t seem to have consequence.  There never seems to be any less of them than before.  That’s bad for morale.”

“Your lack of morale is an unfortunate loss, but it doesn’t matter.  You keep going or you die.  That’s the end of it.”

The human stepped back, and Wheatley thought he recognised the tilt of his eyebrows as hopelessness.  Tilted eyebrows meant a lot of things, though, so he wouldn’t bet on it.  “Look, mate,” he said, hoping he remembered what ‘morale’ meant, “living on this, this empty world must’ve been rough, right?”

“Yes,” the man answered, doing some other tilty thing with his eyebrows that Wheatley didn’t bother to think any further about. 

“You’re about to get it back!  Just gotta hang in there for a bit longer, bit longer, eh?  C’mon.  You’ve lasted all this time!  Just a bit longer.  Really.”  He was pretty sure there was only about thirty hours left to the whole thing.  They’d sleep for eight of those, so just… twenty-two hours to go!  They could manage it.  “You’re about to be free and clear!  Can’t give up when you’re so close, c’mon, just get the last of ‘em and uh, and you can go do whatever you want.  Well.  Almost whatever you want.  I’m sure you’ll still have uh, have laws and whatnot.  Um.  Yes.”

“You’re right.”  The human gave him a crisp nod and pulled the rest of his shirt out of his pants, smoothing it over them instead.  “I’ll pass that along.  Thank you, sir.  I’ll see you again when this is all over.”  And then he saluted and ran out of the room.

… sir?

Wheatley couldn’t stop staring after him.  Was that human off his rocker, saluting and saying something like that to Wheatley?  He wasn’t sure how long he would have sat there in disbelief, only that the spell was shattered when GLaDOS started gigging.  And he almost missed it, because he was lost in his little world of confusion.

“What?” he asked, half delighted that she was doing it and half still dumbfounded.  “What did I do?”

“It’s nothing.”

“What just happened?”

“You raised his morale.”  She was very amused by the whole thing and he was fairly certain she wasn’t really looking at the screen she was facing.  “I suppose he thought you were in charge in some capacity as well.”

Humans got dumber every day!  “He thought, he thought I was in charge?”

“It seems that way.”

“I don’t get it,” muttered Wheatley, shaking his core and going back to his monitor.  The dots were a little closer to the orange line now.  “Humans.”

“No,” GLaDOS said.  “He was right.  You did a good job.  He wanted me to make him feel better about himself.  That’s not something I’m very interested in doing.  I’m busy.”

Which roughly meant, ‘I don’t know how to make humans feel better but I don’t want to admit that’, but Wheatley didn’t care.  He decided he could take a very small break and sped over to give her a nuzzle.  She moved away and shook her core and said, “Not now, Wheatley.”

“Oh, so later, then,” he told her with a wink, not able to resist, and instead of answering she only shifted her chassis uncomfortably. 

He decided not to comment.  Later would come, but the war stuff needed to be taken care of now.  So that later could come.  It all worked out very well.

It did come, though it wasn’t the ‘later’ he was waiting for.  It was a different sort of later, where all the dots slowed down and eventually stopped moving, which told him it was night time.  He’d been staring at them for a few minutes or so when GLaDOS said, “Go to sleep.”

“Ladies first,” he said, frowning.  It was a ploy so she could skip sleeping again, but he wouldn’t know about it because he was asleep.  He wasn’t falling for that, ohhh no.

“I appreciate the sentiment,” she said dryly, “but I can avoid falling asleep and you can’t.  So.  You first.”

Bollocks.  She had a point.  He looked crossly at the floor.  “Alright, fine.  Promise… promise you’ll get me up in a bit?”

“I promise.”  Her voice was serious enough that any worry he’d had vanished.  Though she never broke a promise, so he didn’t have to worry anyway.  She came to take his place in front of the monitor, so he moved a little to make space for her.  He was partway through activating the proper protocols when she gave him a very soft shove.  He looked up at her as best he could, being somewhat shut down at this point, but she just shook her head in dismissal and looked back at the monitor.

She did as promised and traded with him, though later than he would have wanted, and since the screen was much the same as when he’d gone to sleep he figured it wouldn’t hurt if he ignored it for a bit.  Of the two things in the room he could watch where nothing was going on, GLaDOS was much preferred.

He wanted to be responsible, so he didn’t linger on the way the glowing oranges and blues from the monitors played across the surface of her chassis, or on the breathtaking way she seemed to descend from the very blackness of the room, or on trying to see every little adjustment she unconsciously made when he heard the faintest of noises indicating as such.  And he wanted to go down there with her, and cuddle her.  He wanted to.  God, how he wanted to.  But he didn’t.

She hadn’t been up long when the green dots finally appeared.

When he told her about it, she actually shoved him out of the way to look herself.  He was a bit miffed about that, because she could just check the cameras if she really needed proof, but by the time he’d thought of a proper rebuke she’d already moved back to one of the monitors covered in numbers.  She muttered something about the clock being off and then started talking to Alyx.  From what he gathered, Alyx was to send out the androids right away.  When she had finished with that, she shut off her optic for a long moment, then changed one of the screens with numbers to a split-screen of a few different cameras.  As Wheatley watched, a creature of grey and white, about half again as big as the humans, shot blue-tinged barbs into the line of humans in front of it.  As the closest human to it fell, it drove itself forward, burying one barbed foot in the human’s chest.  The human grasped at the leg desperately as the two nearby him tried to shake off the effects of the initial attack, but he was unable to stop the creature from dragging its leg sharply down.  Red liquid spilled onto the trampled dirt and flecked the grey leg as the attacker moved back, sighting its next victim.  Wheatley looked at GLaDOS in horror.  “This is what I motivated them for?” he cried out.  He disliked humans as much as the next AI, but that… that was too much!

“The androids will take care of it,” GLaDOS murmured.  “That’s what I saved them for.”

Wheatley was about to protest their lack of actual presence when one of them did appear, driving a heavy fist into the glowing red optics of the creature still making up its mind, the impact spraying sparks and whitish fluid.  It was a stocky, squarish thing, one optic set into its chest cavity.  It looked to be plated in heavy grey steel through and through, which was proven when the stricken creature attempted to stab at the android with one of those sharp feet and only glanced off the armour.

“It looks quite old, but it seems to be doing the job,” he said, encouraged by this sight.  GLaDOS nodded a little.

“They are very old.  And I don’t have a lot of them.  When Aperture went bankrupt, ninety percent of research was suspended and that included these androids.  I barely had materials to fix them, let alone build any more.  There aren’t enough, but what we do have will have to do.”

The creature skittered back, nearly tripping over the dead human as it did so, the other humans in the vicinity backing up and eyeing both of the constructs with what was probably fear.  The flechettes came out again, and as it was struck the android froze.  Wheatley gasped a little.  “Luv, it – “

“It’s fine,” she interrupted.  “The Hunters can stun the androids, but it would take more of them to short one out.  It’s the Striders that will prove problematic.”  She changed the monitor so that one of the other views was more prominent.  “Their heavy artillery.”

A Strider, it seemed, was sort of like a giant three-legged spider, with a massive gun mounted beneath the body.  It tore up the ground with scattered fire from the cannon, throwing up dust and running humans alike.  Though it had only just entered the battlefield, there were already humans bending to support themselves on one knee as they hefted the heavy rocket launchers over their shoulders, paired with at least two other humans equipped with pulse rifles.  The ground was shrouded with heavy clouds of dust, rising up almost as high as the humans were tall.  The Strider swung low towards the ground, pinpointing one of the little groups with a thin blue laser.  The three humans in the group all discharged their weapons simultaneously and scrambled away, almost faster than he’d ever seen them move.  The slower humans were caught in the blast from the weapon as it impacted, blowing a massive crater into the dirt.  Aside from a few weapons accidentally thrown away and out of the radius of the laser, there was no sign that the humans had been there.

“My God,” Wheatley whispered.  “These guys’re… what’re they doing this for?”

“Dirt,” GLaDOS said, voice far too controlled.  “They don’t have enough of their own dirt, and now they want mine.”

He lowered his upper plate in confusion.

“I do live here,” she told him indignantly.  “Therefore, it’s my dirt.”

“Okay, sweetheart.”  He was confident she didn’t think the whole planet was hers, but if she wanted to pretend it was for now, that was fine with him.  He shook his core as the Strider violently speared a fleeing human between the shoulder blades.  “I better never hear another human say anything bad about, about you again.”

“Why?”

“There’s nothing you’ve done that uh, that even compares to this.”  He gestured at the screen with his upper handle.  “You wanted to um, to be yourself and, and to be left alone.  These guys, they just… just want to kill people.”

“The reason does not forgive the deed.  And it ignores the fact that I did want to kill them for entertainment.  But that’s another matter.  This is almost over.  Let’s just do it and get it over with.  Miss Vance.”

“Yeah?” came the small woman’s faint voice from one of the chamber’s hidden speakers,

“You sent them all out?”

“Yeah.  They’re way too slow, GLaDOS.  I don’t know how they’re gonna take out all the Striders without being vaped themselves.”

“They should be fine for now,” GLaDOS told her.  “The Striders target large objects and groups foremost.  As long as the androids stay solitary they should be effective.”

“Until the Hunters learn they can overwhelm them with the flechettes.”

GLaDOS remained silent for a long moment.  “Yes.”

“We lost one already,” Alyx went on.  “One of the Hunters drove it into vaping range.”

“Too fast,” GLaDOS murmured.  “Everything should still be fine, however.”

“They have more Striders than you do androids.”

“I suppose the humans are just going to have to make use of the pulse cannons and the rocket launchers, then,” GLaDOS snapped.  “I already told you.  Aperture’s days as a manufacturing plant are long over.  I gave you what I have.  If I had anything else, don’t you think it would be out there by now?”

“Okay!  Okay,” Alyx responded.  “Calm down.  I was just making an observation.  No need to blow up on me.”

“Fine.”

“And GLaDOS?”

“Yes?”

“Carrie is doing fine.  Since I know you were about to ask and all.”

That, Wheatley thought angrily, had been very low.  GLaDOS had asked after Carrie every day other than this one, and she hadn’t today because she’d woken up to massive aliens blowing out her front door, practically!  It was just plain out of line to say something like that in a circumstance like this!

But after what had happened over the last year, GLaDOS shrank back a little out of guilt for not remembering to ask after Carrie.  As if she’d had time.  As if she hadn’t trusted Alyx to keep her safe.

“Tell her that… we are doing fine, as well,” GLaDOS said.

“Will do.  See you later.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Wheatley said vehemently as soon as the hiss of the ambient noise from Alyx’s microphone vanished.  “You got up and were attacked by, by Striders and Hunters and you –“

“It’s all right,” she interrupted.  “At least we know.”

“But – “

“I don’t want to fight about it.”

Wheatley decided to concede for the moment and they both went back to the surveillance monitor.  They hadn’t been doing that long when Surveillance itself piped up, Central Core, the one on the west side –

I know. 

Just checking.

“What’s up on the uh, on the west side?” Wheatley demanded. 

“Probability is that there’s going to be a breach.”

“They’re going to get in?”  After three days, they still hadn’t killed enough of the aliens to prevent that?

“Yes,” GLaDOS answered.  “It will be perfectly fine.  Don’t worry about it.”

But Wheatley was worried, because he saw a lot of running humans and a lack of successful fighting on their part.  The churned dirt was dark with human blood and spotted with the white and the yellow fluids dripping from the injured Hunters and Striders.   Bodies of all kinds lay spread-eagled on the ground, and though Wheatley couldn’t tell the humans from the Overwatch, there were a lot more dark bodies than those of the more dangerous aliens.  He hoped that only a few of the black shapes were humans.

“Which one is on the west?” he asked her, and without comment she changed the dominant view to that of a Strider marching determinedly towards the facility, pausing only to fire quickly at the humans darting around the long legs and beneath the small body.  “He’s going to, to breach?”

“Mm.”

“Why don’t you stop it, then, if you know?” Wheatley demanded frantically.  “Just... just kill it!  Before it gets here!”

“It’s better just to let it,” GLaDOS answered.  “It’s distracted.  As long as it focuses on breaching, it won’t focus on the infantry.  And they can shoot at it from behind while it breaches.”

GLaDOS’s monitor suddenly exploded with light, all of the images disappearing in a wash of red, green, and blue.  GLaDOS snapped back, whispering, “What the hell?”  Wheatley had to squint until his lens adjusted. 

“Gladys, what is that?”

“They disabled all the cameras,” GLaDOS said a little distractedly, moving ‘round to inspect one of the monitors with code scrolling down it.  “They’re all still operational.  This doesn’t make any sense…”

Central Core, Surveillance spoke up, I wasn’t quite able to confirm, but I think they’re blinding the cameras with laser light.

“Damn it.  I didn’t think of that.  Who does think of that?  Who carries around industrial strength lasers?  This is stupid.”  She generated static.  “You’re still not going to beat me, you know.  You can blind me but you cannot stop me.  You’re just drawing this out for no reason.”

“GLaDOS.”  Wheatley jumped to hear the unexpected interruption.  “The power is out.”

“I don’t suppose that could be because of the hole in the ceiling,” GLaDOS muttered.

“What?  I didn’t catch that.”

“Give the nanobots five minutes.  Was that all?”

“Are they in here, GLaDOS?”

“I don’t know.”  Wheatley willed her to stay calm.  Alyx didn’t know.  And Alyx couldn’t do anything if she had.  “External surveillance has been blinded.”

“With what?”

“We suspect lasers.”

“Well, that’s a bust until someone breaks the generators by mistake,” Alyx mused. 

“When I see evidence of a breach, I will let you know.  They probably have done so already, but I can’t see them yet.”

“All right.  Thanks.”

GLaDOS changed the view on the monitors so that all of the images came from inside of the facility, beginning to flick through them one by one, but they all showed nothing. 

“Come on… I know you’re here…”

Out of nowhere a Hunter burst into view, leaping towards the camera, and both Wheatley and GLaDOS started in surprise.  On GLaDOS’s part this also involved smashing the synth into the floor with a Crusher, and she stared at the mangled pieces for a few moments longer than was necessary to confirm it was dead.

“Gladys?”

“I didn’t mean to do that,” she answered, in one of her strangely breathless-sounding voices.  “That was… instinct.  I don’t think I’ve ever done something like that before.”

“Oh,” Wheatley said.  Better late than never, he supposed. 

“That was… thrilling.”  She shook her core a little, and Wheatley was amused by her reaction.  He was glad she’d done something without running it through logic and that she was okay with it.  He did wish it’d happened at some other time, though.  Because that’d been pretty cute and he couldn’t do anything about it at the moment.

She resumed her panning, a little fast for Wheatley’s comfort, when she froze and looked up at the ceiling.  Wheatley followed her gaze but didn’t find anything. 

“The GPS just stopped working,” she clarified before he was able to ask.  “I don’t… they’ve disrupted my satellites.”

“How?”

She shook her core wearily.  “They’re only being jammed, but… Wheatley, go find Caroline.”

“We know where she is,” Wheatley protested.  “She’s with Alyx.”

“I don’t know that anymore,” GLaDOS argued.  “Look.  They’ve disabled the GPS.  They’ve disabled external surveillance.  I don’t know what’s next on their list of things to make my life hell.  Just go and find her.”

“What am I s’posed to do when I get there!” Wheatley yelled.  Carrie was fine, she was with someone!  Why did he have to go and leave GLaDOS alone?  That made no sense. 

“It’s stupid.  I know it is.”  She was speaking softly, and not looking at him.  “But… I would feel better if you were with her.  I know you can’t do anything.  That’s all right.  I’m not sending you there to be a hero.  But things are not going well.  She should have family with her.  She will feel better and so will I.”

“And you?”  He was trying very hard not to understand, he was trying hard to be angry because he didn’t want to go, he was at least a little useful here and not at all useful anywhere else!  Carrie had said Alyx was like a big sister, she didn’t need him too!

She turned her core to look at him calmly.

“Since when have I ever been very far away?”

“Never,” Wheatley conceded reluctantly in a quiet voice.

“So get a move on.  You’ve been here long enough.  I’m quite tired of you.”

“Took you long enough.”

“Keep moving.  You haven’t quite left yet.”    

And he did, not really able to convince himself it was for the best, but he stopped at the doorway and said, “Call me if you… if you need me.”

“To do what,” she said, deadpan.  “Distract me?”

“I am pretty good at that,” he admitted.  “Don’t uh… well, just… okay, I’m leaving.”

He moved as quickly as he could, seeing as if he had to do something he may as well do it fast.  The facility seemed to be shaking, and he didn’t like it.  Just how many breaches were there?  Who could tell, now that the cameras were down?  And could GLaDOS truly contain them all?

Carrie and Alyx were in a room near the main entrance, where the ground bevelled down belowground to the one set of doors that wasn’t a secret.  That had not originally been the building scheme of the facility, but after the Incident, GLaDOS had removed the upper buildings to better hide herself.  The ladies had been placed there so Alyx would have an easier time of accessing the military androids. They’d been programmed to retreat to her if they were damaged to the point of imminent destruction, so she could fix them.  He knew how to get there, but he still paused now and again to make sure. 

After a few more minutes, he was at his destination, but the people he was there to meet were not.  He frowned and quickly scanned the small room, trying to determine if they were hiding or not.  There weren’t a lot of places to hide – there were a few benches with tools on them and the wall on his right when he’d entered was lined with dull metal cupboards – but who knew.  When his search proved fruitless, he turned ‘round and called, “Carrie!”

Nothing.

Well, other than an odd, high-pitched noise… but he didn’t know the sound of all the machinery in the –

He yelled and moved back as fast as he could as the part of the room he’d just been about to move into vanished in a flash of white light.  Everything that’d just been there, it was gone, and he’d almost been gone, he had almost gotten himself vapourised -

“Carrie!”  If Carrie had been vapourised, GLaDOS was going to kill him.  She was going to kill him very violently, possibly with a drill – oh God, not the drill, not the drill, he privately begged her.  “Carrie!”

“Dad?”

Wheatley almost fell off the control arm, he was that relieved.  Shoving images of drills out of his mind, he tried to figure out where her faint voice was coming from.  He couldn’t go back the way he’d come, that’d been zapped… aha!  Another door, on the other side of the room.  He didn’t need to use a door, but Alyx did, and where he found one he’d find the other.  Hopefully.  If Alyx had left Carrie alone, he might not be able to prevent himself from helping GLaDOS kill her.

“Carrie?” he asked as he moved into the other hallway, looking left and right quickly.  To the left was more dark hallway, but to the right was another massive hole through which he could see the outside…

Outside?  What was Carrie doing outside?

She couldn’t be outside, Wheatley thought to himself, shaking his core and choosing to look down the hallway.  GLaDOS had said quite clearly that she was not to go near the fighting, and outside was definitely –

“Dad!  Over here!”

Yep.  She was outside.